


Danse Macabre

by lucius_complex



Series: XV [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark Fantasy, Folklore, High levels of non-con, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-03 06:07:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1733876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucius_complex/pseuds/lucius_complex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say it only takes one wrong path, one slipped word, one note of laughter too loud, too scornful, too <em>sure - </em>to attract the attention of a fae.</p><p>They say the fae folk have power to do acts of good and acts of malice and think naught of either or both.</p><p>Everything they say is true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumadesatada](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumadesatada/gifts).



> Reviewer gift fic! Her request: Tim Burton-esque horror, the Unseelie court, faery rings, fae King Loki. 
> 
> Please note that this story is Dark, so fluff addicts might wish to scurry away.

**XV**

 

_And he wha spills the fairies' ring_

_Betide him want and wae._

 

17

Sometimes Tony wakes up and thinks, _it feels like I’ve been sleeping for years._

And in the same vein thinks, _I feel like I would do anything in return for one night’s sleep._

His bed is both comfortable and unfamiliar – Tony thinks he shouldn’t move. Tony thinks he should stay here, because lately tiredness has become a way of life; lately life has become a sort of sleeping death. Lately _things-_

He doesn’t remember. And the silence is so loud when he wakes, all he can hear is the way the stillness screams.

What day is it? Does he care anymore?

 

 

1

He’d made a big mistake once, but he doesn’t remember what mistake it was.

Tony knew it was something he’d said. From a lifetime ago, when he once imagined words were cheap and action was everything.

 

_You know better now, don't you._

He knows better now.

 

 

10

Loki says: ‘Come and dance, human,’ and Tony stumbles back into the middle of the faery circle. His body aches, but his limbs kick up, unheeding of the screaming going on in his head. His hands are passed from fae to fae, feet spinning. He moves with them, and his movements are light and gay.

Tony jumps and spins and claps – and the hours, they whirl away. He wears holes into Italian soles, burning and biting into soft human flesh – but he just kicks higher, smiles brighter, heel, toe, spins, stamps Italian shoes into the ring of grass.  

His ribs are compressed into a cage of horrors.

Stamps, skips and moves on. He cannot stop. He-

Loki catches him, always catches him a moment before he falls. Loki kisses him, breathes poison and salve into his lungs and Tony can spin again.

 _Please,_ he thinks he says to the faery king, although his mouth does not move. _Please_.

The fey king laughs without sound. _Does it not please you, pretty human?_ Loki asked in his voiceless way. _I have given you the means to stand in two worlds._

Tony’s head wants to explode when Loki speaks into his skull like this, but he also never wants Loki to stop speaking.

 _Please,_ he thinks, and has no idea what he’s thinking. What he’s begging for.

Loki laughs, the laughter of smoke and gallows and his crown of ivy rustles when he kisses him.

 

 

7

Sometimes Tony wakes up and thinks, _it feels like I’m existing in two places at once._

There is too much light. What sort of blackout drapes lets in so much light?

He’s so tired. So tired. Something in Tony’s body proclaims that it has never felt so raw. His feet feels as if they’d been run over.

He burrows back into bed, tells JARVIS to ensure his solitude. Of course he’ll explain himself. Once he feels better, he’ll get up and call Pepper. Once he gets some rest, he’ll be right as rain-

 _Rain._ Something is his touching his skin. Tony chokes and curls into a ball. He wishes for silence. He wants to scream.

Rain. Something is following him. He runs. Something is touching his skin, fear closes up his throat and Tony runs, he _runs_ \- there are footsteps and whispers, the lashing of tree branches on his face and chest. There is too much sound in Tony’s head. The sound of colliding worlds. The sound of dancing and fire and ice. The sound of growing roots.

_There there, human. Before your heart gives._

He gazes with confusion into green and blue, the rustle of ivy and cool fingers laying a benediction upon his brown.

‘Please. Your majesty, _please.’_

_Rest, human. Rest._

_*_


	2. Chapter 2

 

**XV**

 

3

It starts with arrogance, as all things do. Pride before fall, and Tony has never been afraid to defy the odds, to shake his fist at the sky and challenge _gods_. What is life without glory, without risks? Cold as stones. Silent as the hollow spaces between his ribs.

It starts with a shovel in his hands. Tony still remembers the sensation of coarse wood on his palms, the jarring brilliance of the scarlet ribbon around it. The wet smell of the earth.  

The ceremony of breaking ground is not something Tony usually attends: construction was but one of his many pocket industries and dull as dust to boot. But Tony _likes_ being random. Random and contrary. He liked showing up where he isn't expected. He _loves_ showing up where he isn't wanted.

Tony likes to be noticed, on his own terms. He’s spent his whole life poking things so they’d whip around and face him.

(Oh how they whip around and face him now, there is no hiding from the attention.)

And who could he blame now, for he had received fair warning from the local folk. Such a hue and cry they'd raised when a foreigner had come in to acquire their abandoned land. And he had received fair warning from the fae king himself; then a beautiful human male with eyes like moist earth and flesh pale as the moon.

(Oh how they prod him and make him dance; and blood pools under his feet but pain is just white noise under the enchantment of Loki’s kisses.)

And all Tony had said in reply then was: ‘Jesus, eyes that colour- what sort of contact lenses are you wearing?’

(And now, and now, now he would have trembled and fallen to his knees. Now he would have crawled on flat belly and kissed the fae king's feet.) 

The beautiful man he does not know smiles, the most secret and attentive of smiles. He wears a bottled green jacket, velveteen as moss after rain.

‘I wear lenses that makes earth into sky, turn kings to orphans, hot pride to cold terror. The local folk have warned you against desecrating a fae ring, American.’’

Tony sidled up to him, intrigued. ‘That’s some lenses you got there then. What’s your name and how do I get you to come home with me?’

‘All lenses are mirrors,’ the stranger continues to tells Tony in a low voice that exactly matches the mystery of his face, ‘-and all mirrors are contracts. I am Loki, who will come to you, and watch in the mirror as you come to me.’   

Tony laughs and, shovel forgotten, winds an arm around the stranger. ‘Am I supposed to understand any of that? You’re one of those Dead Poet Society types, aren’t you? God you’re beautiful, your eyes are beautiful, what’s a specimen like you doing in a dump like this?’

‘This dump is my home. I would show it to you, American. Take my hand, and dance through worlds within worlds and myths amongst men.’

Tony waves a dismissive hand. ‘Sure thing. Whatever you say, sweet cheeks. Lemme finish planting that shovel into this god forsaken bit of grass and then we can vamoose to someplace more private. You can show me _all_ your moves, beautiful.’

‘And so I will, American. So I will,’ Loki laughs, and disappears.   

*

 

 

8

Seldom can Tony bear to remember how it all started, and when he does he sobs.

Then he remembers, and flashes of blue and green dance before his eyes. The smell of wet earth rises from the ground; the bright paper ribbon from the shovel that Loki had wrapped around his naked throat, papercuts kissing soft flesh - this is the price of a shovelful of dirt, and Tony's textbook confidence.   

Loki twirls the ribbon ends in his clawed fingertips, a ceremonial bauble, red as candy wrappers.

Loki kisses him and leads him into the dance, and the crowd swallows him whole.

 

*


	3. Chapter 3

**XV**

 

6

In mornings he drags himself to the bathroom and stands naked before the mirror with its white recessed lights. He has circles around his eyes like purple flowers, recently watered. He has a hundred scars on his body that defied explanation. The soles of his feet were blistered and wept with sores.

If they catch sight of him, the humans, Tony knew they’d accuse him of self-harm. They already accused him of madness.

They’d point their fingers and call him weak and attention seeking, as Tony himself had once called the suicide of a teenage boy whose father had worked for him. The boy had spoken of strange and laughable things; the terror of mirrored worlds, of a beauty closer to cruelty than the Black Donald himself.  And upon those words he’d throw himself into the North Sea.

Back then, Tony had called it fanciful cowardice. A form of escape.

Now, he searches for the will to do the same, but Loki’s eyes leave their blue-green trails upon his body, binds Tony to his kingdom with only the spider threads of fey whisperings, the silken touch of his mouth upon Tony’s skin. 

‘I have captured so many over the untold years,’ the fae king tells him between kisses, ‘-but none I have liked so much as you.’

Tony can dream all he likes of suicide. But night falls, and his feet carries him back to Loki, and carries him back into dance.

 

 

5

He is so tired. His heart would give out, if only Loki would stop kissing him. His joints would slip out of their rubbery sockets, if only the king would let him go.

_Please. Please._

_How sweetly you beg, who never begged for a thing in your life._

_I don’t want to die._

The sharp claws around his waist tightens. _You are very much alive, pretty human. And I would keep you so for an age to come._

Even through the drugging dance Tony’s consciousness attempts to tear through the magic his body is enveloped within in, jerks and trembles with effort and Loki waltzes them to a halt, his usually impassive face curling into a smile.

‘Your struggles are futile, but impressive.’ 

 _Please. Please._ Tony kisses without shame his king’s chest, his knuckles, his palms. He kisses the glowing rings of power that Loki wears. _Anything but this._

‘Very well, let us try a different sort of dance,’ the fae king relents in his deceptively mild voice, and Tony sneezes at the pollen that falls simmering from Loki’s hair as he bends and catches their mouth together. Loki's tongue is a greedy, delighted worm in his mouth, simultaneously repulsive and desirable.

He inhales something in the king’s falling pollen that enters his brain and switches everything off. Like a building that goes dark floor by floor, Tony simply _drops_  into sharp claws and waiting arms. And then he is dazed and weak and helpless, carried like a doll up to the king’s throne of twisted branches fanning out like cobra-heads, wreathed in ivy leaves.

Loki lifts him onto his lap and scratches his human clothes off with his clawed fingers and Tony is in no position to stop him; it is all he can do to hang on to his consciousness and keep his eyes from rolling onto the back of his head. What little of him that still operates and hasn’t gone insensate inform him of Loki’s amused reactions to his internalized pleas for mercy. Tony begs, and Loki’s smile is gentle as a Madonna, his claws are delicate on Tony’s chest, the slightest hint of threat as it drags in idle circles above his ribs.

‘I would crawl into you, human, and feel every inch of you quiver and dance for me.’ Loki whispers into the shell of his ear before delicately taking a lobe into his mouth. And the fey king pushes into him, slow, alien, irreversible, a wound that will never heal. 'If you struggle overmuch, through your own carelessness you shall bleed.'

A voiceless scream part his human lips but nobody can hear it, not even Tony himself.

 

 

2

The days before captivity was like a different life. A different life Tony knows he still lives, for he wakes up every morning in his own bed, feels the weight of blankets sticky with dried blood and damp cum, the restraining hands of Rhodey and the memories of Pepper’s tears.

 _Tony tell us what’s wrong_ – _Tony please speak to us_.

 _Goddamn Stark, why won’t you_ _say something_ _?_ _Anything?_

He wants to tell them: ‘You’re looking in the wrong places. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’

But the sun slips away, and Loki calls him home.

*

 


	4. Chapter 4

**XV**

 

9

The other faes hiss at Tony, but Loki turns upon them with wild, angry eyes and his fangs bared. They cringe away, chattering in anger with slithering consonants.  Tony feels the weight of their baleful hatred like vicious hail upon him. He can feel the rapid sting of spells; as harmless as they were mean-spirited. Branches scratch at his face, roots attempt to catch his ankles, a number of small illusions disorient him. 

His lips bleed, his ankles give way, and Loki catches him.

‘They think you are stay too long, human.’

Loki’s clawed fingers tightens on his human’s waist, scratching bloody lines as he hauls Tony against him. He is speaking in the language of magics to his court – its very sound a threat, an amplified palpitation. Tony almost falls over in a swoon.

‘Come,’ Loki takes him by the wrist and all but drags him back to his throne. The other faes fall away in mutinous obedience at the look of cruel promise in Loki’s eye. The fae king rides his human captive there upon his throne for all to see, naked and gloriously unashamed, and like some invisible sign suddenly the entire court is tearing into each other, a frantic orgy of touch and copulation. Sighs and cries fill the air; a floating, shimmering dust suffuses the forest like pollen, like languid fireflies or will o' the wisp.

Tony dances for his king, the helpless writhing dance that Loki wrung from his body with such apparent delight, murmuring mindless encouragements and dousing more pollen around them. Loki’s hips rise and falls in languid piston, stroking himself into Tonys body with firm, unhurried strokes. His hands lay on Tony’s thighs in a deceptively loose grip, but they have the weight of ancient stones, holding the human firmly in place.

'Dance for me, human. Dance only for me.'

Tony does not speak: he keeps his body slack and obedient, keeps his eyes opened despite the blue-green that swallows his vision like a cloud. He is a doll. A vessel. An empty thing.

 _Survive,_ he tells himself. He knows he’s not the only captive in Loki's court. There must be other humans like him, dancing themselves into their own graves.

Survive. _Survive._

 

 

13

In the quieter moments, under the cover of their bed of leaves Loki tells about the Unseenlie court. He speaks of servants such as Bodoach, who creeps into the houses of humans to steal the children from their beds. Tony has seen him before, lurking in the fringes of the ring; Bodoach is easily identified by his red eyes, skin in variegated splotches of blue and green and brown, and he shuffled ponderously with a limp and a switch. Shunned by other faeries, he had a tendency of backing away whenever Loki inadvertently crossed his path. 

‘Bodoach sells the children he steals to swell the ranks of my court. We can only take the very young, for only at that age do human children still possess a whisper of the fae in them. They can be taught to see the Unseenlies, to recognize the dark tune that whispers in the heart of the forests, they can be taught to listen and sing back its tune.’

‘He’s pretty slow for a thief,’ Tony ventures, and Loki looks down at him with a pleased expression. Bizarre as it sounds, Loki wants not just to be recognised and dreaded, but also to be known.

‘He is slow until he picks up a child. Then his legs matches the speed of the fastest of steeds.’

Tony filled away the fact that Loki might have come from a time when horses were the fastest means of transport. ‘Did Bodach catch you?’

The fae king does not answer. Instead he bloodies Tony lips with a toothy kiss: caress and warning both. Sharp fangs punctures his lips and throat, and Tony’s head starts to spin, his shirt soaked with warm blood running down his chest.

The agony is indescribable. It is like being eaten alive, and all he can do is moan. He has a tongue, slicked with blood and Loki’s spit, but it might well have been sliced off.

 _The sight of your thrall,_ Loki sighs outwardly with pleasure even as his voice fills Tony’s skull with the most unbearable resonance. _It pleases me so._

Deep within Tony's own heart he is aware from Loki’s welcoming expression that the fae could hear his subconscious self ever begging for mercy. Tony has left his pride behind a long time ago, back in a time where words like _atheist_ and _scientific inquiry_ was still in his vocabulary. Back when everything that hadn't fit between the covers of his textbooks at Yale could then be conveniently dropped into a well and forgotten.

If he is lucky, he thinks he might be able to die this time. Of late Loki is beginning to forget Tony's humanness; his growing enthusiasm and playfulness results in more blood than ever, far more pain than customary.

If it would be his last night then, Tony finds he does not care: it would be such sweet relief.

Deliberately the human tilts his chin, bares his throat in invitation and undulates his body under the bright, fierce gaze of the fae king’s perusal. He wills Loki to lose himself in the pleasure of taking him. To tear into his flesh. Rip this human body apart like a cat rips apart a rat – and in doing so free him. _In all that is holy,_ Tony thinks, _if God existed, or the fates that moved the world knew any compassion - let them free him from this prison_ , this masquerade of hell on earth. Let him die. Please. Please.

Clawed hands seized his throat. ‘My pretty thing,’ his captor breathes, '-do you really think it would be so _easy?'_  

Loki’s eyes are so black, hell itself seems to burn within them. He pulls Tony near, seemingly intent on devouring him whole. Tony closes his eyes- he’s ready. So ready. He wants it so much, this tipping point, he thinks he can cum from the thought of it alone.

The cry of a robin pierces the air: shrill, piercing and incongruous in the night. The bellow of horns follow, and the dancing faes pull apart.

Tony watches at Loki releases him with an odd look on his face and rise to his feet. From the air a wreath of ivy leaves forms, twisting into a crown interspaced with a skeletal network of sharpened twigs. Four panels of wings extended from his shoulder blades, iridescent and transparent, intricately veined in green and gold.  The air around them is changing, becoming lighter and brisker, more alert.

Disappointment crushes Tony's soul, even as his curiosity is stirred at the sudden ceremony in Loki's court.

‘Hide yourself, human,’ Loki drawls when he finally remembers the mortal cowering by his throne; green eyes a shade of poison Tony had never seen. ‘My wife returns, and she will not be pleased to see you.’

*

 

 


End file.
